Aorus is Gigabyte’s gaming brand and this is a gamer’s workstation drive. The card supports TRIM and SMART, and has a full body copper heat spreader. It requires an external 2GB DDR4 cache.

Gigabyte supplies a five-year warranty but does not reveal the Aorus drive’s endurance. There is no lifetime terabytes written rating.

This is the first PCIe 4 drive we have seen and we are eager to see a data centre drive using PCIe 4.0. But, with PCIe v5.0 systems likely to appear ion a year’s time vendors may skip the 4.0 standard.